“It also caused the transport of fourteen tons of limestone to the general vicinity of the moon. The stone, borrowed from the base of a statue of a general that nobody remembered, was pulverized in the process. It came to rest as individual molecules of calcium carbonate, which vacuum and raw sunlight soon converted to carbon dioxide and calcium oxide, the latter of which covered the entire nearside surface of the moon, increasing its albedo by three hundred percent.
“A moon four times brighter than usual got people’s attention, lowering the crime rate in some areas and raising it in places where people believed in werewolves.”
“You’re giving me a very flippant rendition of history, Quincy,” I said.
“I’m telling you the unadulterated truth. Anyway, it happens that I am a very flippant man, Mickolai. The trait has high survival value.”
“I believe you. But go on with what you were telling me.”
“Thank you,” he said, opening another beer. “So the General Dynamics division of Tandy Craft soon bought our heroes out for a piddling half billion dollars, which was actually quite a bit of money in those days, and the work was continued in the `proper hands,’ with well-educated workers striving diligently in white lab smocks and well-funded laboratories. All of it was under quite proper direction. Smith’s moon dusting feat was duplicated in a mere four years, and thereafter progress was steady.
“Smith, meanwhile, retired at the age of twenty-four and spent the remainder of his life writing his autobiography for posterity, and publishing it eventually at his own expense. He was, after all, a history major.
“Once the patents ran out in 2040, a frustrated Tandy Craft employee named Zbigniew Pildewski proved to his own satisfaction that it was impossible to focus the device accurately enough to transmit anything useful over more than six feet, and then only into a hard vacuum. The problem was the lack of a suitable receiver, which he proceeded to design and build with the help of several other former GD-TC employees. They were funded by a wealthy, aging ex-encyclopedia salesman, who became their silent partner.
“In 2041, Pildewski Interplanetary Transport, Inc., was born, with a contract to dispose of seven million tons of New York City garbage a day. They fulfilled their contract without the use of Pildewski’s receiver, simply by dumping the trash into the Sun, until a cash customer could be found for all those hydrocarbons and other volatiles on Ceres. After the disposal contracts came the raw materials deals, and nickel-iron from the asteroids was delivered by the megaton to the Yokohama and Sons foundry in Bangkok.
“Within a decade, there were Hassan-Smith devices on or around every major body in the solar system, and the eyes of humanity turned farther outward yet, to the stars.
“You see, the simple fact was that while the solar system was an okay place to visit, and there were a lot of useful things out there, nobody wanted to live in a tin can on Ganymede or Mars any more than they wanted to live in a tin can on the Indian Ocean, which at least has air around it.
“But there had to be planets around some of the stars, and some of them had to be nice enough to make you want to live on them. Funded by the Wealthy Nations Group, an informal, non-UN organization, thousands of robot ships were sent with Hassan-Smith devices into the great deep. They were simple enough. Even crude chemical rockets can reach relativistic speeds if they don’t have to carry their fuel with them.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “But I’m running dry. Agnieshka! Bring us some more beers!” She was there before I had my mouth shut. Things like that happen all the time in Dream World.
“Right,” he said, taking a cold one from her. “So ice mines on the moons of Neptune fed solar factories inside the orbit of Mercury. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen were then sent to the robot ships, along with the parts for still more ships to be assembled along the way, to fill out the gaps left by the first few ships. Soon, a sphere of robot ships was expanding from Earth at near light speed, dropping a Hassan-Smith-Pildewski device at every star, even those that didn’t look too promising. After all, nobody planned to ever send a rocket there again, and you never can tell, anyway. Through these devices came exploratory robots, and some of them found planets that were interesting.
“They were just in time. By 2075, the world was getting very crowded, and, from the standpoint of the Wealthy Nations Group, it was getting crowded with the wrong sort of people. You know, those funny-looking troublemakers like me who belong to minority groups.
“As new planets began to be discovered, the Wealthy Nations Group made many minorities an offer that they didn’t want to refuse. Providing that they took all of their annoying brethren with them and never came back, the Wealthy Nations Group would give them a one-way ticket to a planet of their very own. Of course, some planets were nicer than other planets, and what you got depended on just how badly the Wealthy Nations Group wanted to get rid of you.
“American Black People got a planet that could have been a second Earth, only it was a lot nicer. Soviet Uzbeckistanis got a planet of lush green endless plains, and the Catholics of Northern Ireland got an unearthly paradise with the understanding that they had to take their southern brothers and sisters with them.
“Four dozen Middle Eastern minorities got the desert planets of their dreams, and even the Israelis were persuaded to go away after the last of their foreign aid was cut off. And the Yugoslavs got a lovely planet with two small continents and five dozen big islands, enough for each of their various mutually antagonistic minorities.
“With hundreds of fine planets being given away, a Kashubian politician named Bogdan Dzerzdzon decided that his people deserved one, too. He filled out all the paperwork very neatly in triplicate, stood in line, and held his hand out.”
“Quincy, we’re getting into the part of the story where I know better than you, because Bogdan Dzerzdzon was my own great-grandfather,” I said.
“I didn’t realize that you came from such a famous family.”
“It’s no big thing, since the old man had an awful lot of children, and most of them were not particularly legitimate. Actually, he’s my biological great-grandfather on both sides of my family, but my parents didn’t find out about it until they already had six kids, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. For obvious reasons, my great-grandmothers weren’t very eager to talk about the true parentage of some of their children, and the facts came out only after they got to genotyping everybody as a standard practice. But that’s another story.”
“No, you go on. I’d like to hear about what his family thought about the whole affair.”
“If you like,” I said, trying to pick up on his breezy style of talking. I did in three more beers telling him the true story of Bogdan Dzerzdzon, or at least the one that my grand-uncle told me.
“A good story, Mickolai, but you missed the part about how we all had to vote on accepting the Wealthy Nations Group offer, and we all went to the polls again on the Japanese proposal.”
“Well, you were the one who voted for them. I wasn’t around to be asked! I just got caught in the grinder for what you old people did!”
“I suppose you have a right to feel a little bitter about what happened, but all I can say is that it sure seemed like a good idea at the time. And speaking of time, it’s getting late, and I promised Marysia that I’d do some PT before I went on duty. Even though I’m planning to go the cyborg route, she still nags me about keeping in shape. What say we run an obstacle course together? And some hand-to-hand combat would be nice, up against a real human. I’ve never felt right about fighting with a woman, even if she really is a tank,” he said.
“Personally, I make Agnieshka put on a male persona before I’ll fight her, for the same reasons that you mentioned. I don’t mind killing Lech in the least! But working out with you? Sure, why not? I get nagged about PT, too.”
So we ran his course, which was different from the one I usually ran with Kasia, but was just as hard. We barely kept up with one another, although we both knew that it was faked to keep us even. I half expected Agnieshka to come bouncing along and join us, but she didn’t. Just as well. She can be embarrassing at times, and I wouldn’t want her wearing one of her topless outfits in public.